Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ivy League Admissions.

If you look at the lawsuit that forced Harvard to pubnlicize their admission process, you see that athletics is one of 6 key categories for evaluation. If you can be near the top at 2 of the categories, you're in decent shape. So anyone being recruited as a top/starter athlete is already 50% of the way there. No, an all-state QB with a 3.0 and 1300 SAT won't get in. But if you're at the 25th percentile, you have about the same chance as a non-athlete at 505h percentile in 2 other areas.

And iirc, the "top" of the categories was something like 100-200 of the 40,000 applications, and earning a 2 (of 6 levels) was still top 10% of all applicants.

With a $37B endowment, I'd be surprised if they risked their reputation for a few million dollars (0.1% of their endowment).

In fact, I suspect they'd proudly state they rejected the application, as they like to subtly mention how many 800/1600/2400 applicants they reject.

If you are white or Asian, and your parents are highly educated, and you attend a school with high average scores, and you are not a recruited athlete, and you are not a legacy, I think the effective minimum SAT and ACT scores are higher -- the question is by how much.

It would be interesting to fit a logistic regression model of admissions decisions using GPA, test scores, and the above variables. The schools could do such analyses, and maybe they have, but they will certainly not publish them.

If your school uses the naviance program you can get some idea, though there is still a lot of guesswork involved. The program produces (among lots of other questionably meaningful data) “scattergram” graphs, where you can see data for all the kids from your school who have applied to the specific college you are researching. I believe it is limited to SAT, ACT and GPA, the data covers the previous 5-6 years, and it tells you whether the applicant was accepted, waitlisted, rejected, and whether they eventually matriculated. Of course it’s limited to what data students provide (at least in our district, perhaps there are districts where the counselors provide the data, but I don’t know.)

Being in a not-enormous school district, we found it to be relatively easy to make educated guesses about the data points (and could sometimes even tell which specific kid was represented). For us, it was pretty obvious when a kid was admitted as a recruited athlete- the data points were clearly outliers, significantly outside the cluster of points where most admitted kids fell. Just another dose of reality for those going through the process.

Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
By Erica L. Green and Katie Benner
New York Times
November 30, 2018

BREAUX BRIDGE, La. — Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer.

A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and earned high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.”

The narrative earned Mr. Sassau acceptance to St. John’s University in New York. There was one problem: None of it was true.

“I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies,” Mr. Sassau said.

T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges. A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan.

Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the “Today” show, “Ellen” and the “CBS Morning News.” Education professionals extol T.M. Landry and its 100 or so kindergarten-through-12th-grade students as an example for other Louisiana schools. Wealthy supporters have pushed the Landrys, who have little educational training, to expand to other cities. Small donors, heartened by the web videos, send in a steady stream of cash.

In reality, the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.

The Landrys’ deception has tainted nearly everyone the school has touched, including students, parents and college admissions officers convinced of a myth.

The colleges “want to be able to get behind the black kids going off and succeeding, and going to all of these schools,” said Raymond Smith Jr., who graduated from T.M. Landry in 2017 and enrolled at N.Y.U. He said that Mr. Landry forced him to exaggerate his father’s absence from his life on his N.Y.U. application.

“It’s a good look,” these colleges “getting these bright, high-flying, came-from-nothing-turned-into-something students,” Mr. Smith said.

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The above is irrelevant to gifted education. I don't know what kind of point you're trying to make here, though there's an implication that's likely based more in pseudoscience or biased interpretations of science than in actual reality. So the leaders of a school were making stuff up. Sure that's wrong, but they aren't the first ones to do that by a wide margin. How many students sign up for 10 school clubs and show up only for pictures in 8 or 9 of them? How many students go on voluntourism trips where they do nothing meaningful for the local people, but instead use the trips to burnish their college apps?

Many people on this board believe in equality of academic opportunity for all students. Doing so would help our brightest students achieve their own potentials. Ideally, their discoveries would help fight disease, help us understand the universe, etc.

Your messages here make it clear that you aren't interested in equality of opportunity based solely on merit, but rather in perpetuating the privilege of wealthy students who may or may not be gifted, to the detriment of pretty much everyone else:


So please, spare us your one-sided writings complaining about the injustice of "racial boxes" in admissions while you continue to support "money boxes," or, as you note, willingness and ability to pay. Your preferred form of discrimination isn't okay just because you prefer it. Everyone feels the same way about their pet forms of discrimination, which is why they all need to go. Really: we don't have to turn everything into a bare-toothed competition, and if some among us would stop trying to grab more and more and more, everyone would be a lot better off. Even the ones who'd end up with less, because they had too much to begin with. It's a gluttony thing.

For the record, I don't like admissions that focus on anything but merit, but I also think that the diversity-based initiatives should be the last things to go --- and only once we've finally addressed the economic and social stresses that savage cognitive achievement.

‘They’re Not Fact-Checking’: How Lies on College Applications Can Slip Through the Net
By Anemona Hartocollis
New York Times
December 16, 2018

...

As college admissions become ever more competitive, with the most elite schools admitting only 4 percent or 5 percent of applicants, the pressure to exaggerate, embellish, lie and cheat on college applications has intensified, admissions officials say. The high-stakes process remains largely based on trust: Very little is done in the way of fact-checking, and on the few occasions officials do catch outright lies, they often do so by chance.

A recent New York Times investigation found that the leaders of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School, a private high school in Louisiana, doctored transcripts and fabricated up-from-hardship stories on college applications in a systematic effort to land students at selective universities. The revelations have highlighted critical vulnerabilities in the admissions process and cast doubts on a system that some officials and consultants say inadvertently invites exploitation.

In the Landry case, school officials made up tales drawn from racial stereotypes, with the aim of enhancing a student’s chances of admission. But universities that encourage students to write such hard-luck stories, experts say, share the blame.

“There is an alignment of incentives to work the system,” said Christopher Hunt, who runs College Essay Mentor, a consulting service. “Landry is an extreme. Much more common is students, parents and school college counselors trying to figure out what admissions officers ‘want’ and molding students’ lives and applications to the vision of success.”

...

Mainly, officials and counselors said, they look for inconsistencies. Do standardized test scores and grades match? Do certain words and phrases in an essay jump out as being in the vocabulary of an adult rather than a teenager? Are a student’s extracurricular activities too good to be true?

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The IRS audits some tax returns at random. If accepted students knew there were a chance of their applications being audited, that would reduce fraud.

The article mentions looking at whether standardized test scores and grades match. But Harvard and other selective schools have made SAT subject tests optional, reducing their ability to do this. Some schools do not require either the SAT or ACT or SAT subject tests.

High schools know who has played on their sports teams. They could make rosters easily available to admissions officers. They could also provide lists of who has had leadership positions in clubs.

My suggestions above, (1) auditing some applications, (2) requiring more tests than just the SAT or ACT, and (3) getting sports information from high schools, would have deterred some of the recently reported fraud. Economics professor Tyler Cowen has a good column about it at Bloomberg. Parents don't pay bribes to get their children into Caltech.


Related thread: xtra time on tests: alleged college admission scam

Yes, and the accepted students with serious fraud have their admissions revoked.

SAT subject tests are offered at the same places the SAT is offered.

I guess I would tend to be in favor of some form of an audit, a fresh set of eyes, transparency.
But the details of the audit process and procedure would sway my vote Yay or Nay.

I'm aware of a few ways in which high schools, both public and private/independent, have been less than truthful in painting a rosy picture of their chosen golden child(ren)... generally offspring of large donors.

Example 1: Due to drug infraction, child could not participate in competitive sports, but despite non-athlete status was given team leadership role. Coach claimed all students on team voted on slips of paper, but vote was tallied in private and totals for each student were not shared.

Example 2: Child enrolled in 2nd year of a world language, actually attended 3rd year classes in the world language, received award in national competition for 2nd year students in that world language.

Example 3: "Mentor" acknowledged one child's original idea. Rather than support that child as promised, shared the idea with a different child and supported that 2nd child to receive a scholarship, using 1st child's original idea.

Example 4: Grading practices to create illusion of equal outcomes despite vastly different performance levels.

I agree, this article is well worth reading.

I think it shows up in the kid not being able to do the school work. DD is in a HG school like Hunter, 7-12. And there are no lower math credits. It is all accelerated. And there are some kids that struggle. We have a friend who's DD was in Hunter and dropped out after 8th grade because it was too hard. She goes to a regular HS now and gets top grades. If you get into Harvard without having the ability to keep up, you won't. There was that book about kids that are MG and top of their school and then get into IVY schools and it is a whole different level and have a breakdown. There is one in our extended family. Had done all AP courses, perfect SAT and went to Princeton and failed physics. Not for a lack of trying, but it was at a whole different level than she was used to. Took a year off and went back and did political science. Nothing against political science, but just saying that if you cannot do the work, it will show. The peer group is mostly what you are going to get at top schools.